Comment on Nelly Furman's "The Study of Women in Language"

Abstract

The review begins by labeling Hiatt's as narrow and orthodox. This comment is followed by a hasty description of computer research which does not account for what computers can do. An awareness of this crucial fact might have alerted the reviewer to another fact-that computers cannot be or unorthodox. It follows that computer research is firmly based on what is, not on what one hopes will be. What the reviewer means, by the way, when she chooses the word orthodox is perplexing.The word discomfits me, for it broadcasts the reviewer's bias from the beginning: Is an orthodox necessarily an invalid one, or is it simply one which feminists must reject automatically? Furman might have paid closer attention to Hiatt's introduction, which surveys the way the majority (orthodox?) have long regarded the feminine style. Hiatt's lucid summary urges a neutral and thus a fair to the subject-certainly not the narrowly defined approach the reviewer ascribes to her.